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The Spy Next Door

Friday, February 22 nd, 2019 at 00:02 am

The Spy Next Door

The Spy Next Door – Movie Review

SYNOPSIS

Former CIA spy Bob Ho (Chan) takes on his toughest assignment to date: looking after his girlfriend’s three kids, who haven’t exactly warmed to their mom’s beau. And when one of the youngsters accidentally downloads a top-secret formula, Bob’s longtime nemesis, a Russian terrorist, pays a visit to the family

JOY’S REVIEW

The Spy Next Door has got Jackie Chan playing Bob Ho, who is an undercover spy for the CIA and China. He lives next door to his girlfriend, Amber Valletta , whom you may know from modeling who is pretty — can’t act, but is pretty who has three kids who are not crazy about having Bob involved in their life. So as always in comedies, he ends up taking care of the kids for several days. Now, any single mother who would let her children be taken care for three days by a man they despise should probably have her children taken away from, but this is the stuff of which comedies are made. And so the kids, to varying degrees, get won over by Jackie. We’ve seen some of his stuff before that it looks kind of ho-hum even though I suspect it’s still very difficult, and he choreographs things with a chair, and with a bicycle, and with a ladder. He does have a sweet, appealing face, can’t act his way out of a paper sack but do we really care? Probably not. The actor of the group is Madeline Carroll, who plays the older, adolescent daughter. She is quite convincing and charming. We also have cameos by George Lopez and Billy-Ray Cyrus. Billy-Ray Cyrus is actually getting to be kind of the cute actor. Again, he plays Billy-Ray Cyrus as himself but he is cute all the same. It’s fun, it’s kind of vaguely appealing, there’s not much here and not much you haven’t seen before. So I’d give it two stars.JOY METER★★★★★